Introduction to Exponentials
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Kaila is the Curator of TEDxChristchurch, a co-founder and Chair of the non-profit Ministry of Awesome, Chairman of the Board of the New York-based Natural Gourmet Institute for Health and Culinary Arts, Deputy Chair of CORE Education Ltd, founder and director of New Zealand social media consultancy Missing Link, and a member of the Advisory Board for Te Pūtahi – Christchurch centre for architecture and city-making.
A native New Yorker, Kaila is fluent in English, Spanish, French and Italian, holds a degree in Hotel and Restaurant Administration from Cornell University and has been a serial entrepreneur since the age of 22. Her purpose in life is to be an uplifting presence.
Nathaniel Calhoun
Global Grand Challenges
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Nathaniel Calhoun sits on the Global Impact Faculty of Singularity University (SU), helping to guide the institution’s strategy and curriculum around creating massive, positive global change. He moderates Executive Programs for SU and is the Director of Global Grand Challenges and Team Project Leader for the Global Solutions Program.
Nathaniel specializes in applying technology to solve problems in low income countries and challenging environments. He founded CODE Innovation in 2007 to help development work organizations like UNICEF and DFiD to use web and mobile technologies more effectively in their education programming. His background in education is particularly deep, with several years of direct teaching experience, and pioneering work with online mentoring programs and out of school youth. He also consults for U.S. educational institutions and non-profits, evaluating the strength of existing digital initiatives and encouraging the creation of more effective ones.
Tiago Mattos
Abundance
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Tiago Mattos is considered an important name among the new generation of Futurism thinkers. He is a futurist, entrepreneur, educator, author and teacher, currently in charge of the Futurism track of the Transdisciplinary Innovation Program at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In this project, participants can interact and learn from technology experts, including fourteen Nobel Prize winners.
Tiago has also helped to co-found several projects like innovation schools, learning consultancies, technology labs, software bureaus, big data centers, peer-to-peer learning platforms, positive impact accelerators and several others.
On top of that, he’s the co-founder of Perestroika: the biggest school of creative activities in Latin America, which is highly respected by its own way to shape disruptive learning experiences.
Tiago currently leads Aeroli.to, a company that explores future scenarios through an original methodology and has already created experimental projects on virtual reality, internet of things, robotics and artificial intelligence.
David Roberts
A Brief History of Disruption
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David Roberts is regarded as one of the world’s top experts on disruptive innovation and exponentially advancing technology. He is an award winning CEO and serial entrepreneur, and has started ventures backed with over $100 million of investment from Kleiner Perkins, Vinod Khosla, Cisco, Oracle, Accenture, In-Q-Tel, and others. David is Chairman at HaloDrop, a revolutionary global drone services company, Chairman at 1QBit the world’s first software company for quantum computers, and is a formal adviser to Made-In-Space, responsible for manufacturing the first object in Space with a 3D printer on the Space Station.
David has led the development of some of the most complex, state-of-the art systems ever built, to include satellites, drones, and fusion centers. He also worked as an Investment Banker in the Mergers & Acquisitions Group at Goldman Sachs Headquarters. He received his B.S. in Computer Science & Engineering from M.I.T. was a Distinguished Graduate, and majored in Artificial Intelligence and Bio-Computer Engineering. He holds an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.
Mandy Simpson
The Blockchain
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Mandy Simpson has recently been appointed Chief Executive at Wellington based consultancy Cyber Toa, helping companies who handle sensitive financial or personal data to dramatically improve their cyber security. She has deep capital markets expertise, including as Chief Operating Officer at NZX, where she has been an advocate for the development of blockchain technology for financial markets. Prior to that she was Chief Financial Officer for technology company Fronde. Mandy has been in New Zealand for ten years, arriving from the UK where she worked in financial investigation and surveillance roles for Deloitte and the London Stock Exchange.
Mandy is on the Board of NZTech, is an active investor in early stage companies and an advisory board member at BraveNewCoin, a Queenstown based company providing digital currency news and insights. Mandy has a law degree from Cambridge University. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, and a member of the New Zealand Institute of Directors.
Neil Jacobstein
Artificial Intelligence
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Neil Jacobstein is a founding member of the editorial board of AAAS Science Robotics and has served as a technical consultant on AI research and development projects for: DARPA, NSF, NASA, NIH, EPA, DOE, the U.S. Army and Air Force, GM, Ford, Boeing, Applied Materials, NIST, and other agencies. He was CEO of Teknowledge Corporation, a pioneering AI company, where he worked on AI applications systems for industry and government.
Neil has given invited talks worldwide on the technical, business, and ethical implications of exponential technologies, such as AI, robotics, and atomically precise manufacturing. He is also a Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the Stanford University Media X Program, where his research focuses on augmented decision systems.
Amy Fletcher
Exponential Tech and Public Policy
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Amy Fletcher is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Canterbury, who specializes in science, technology and environmental politics. Prior to moving to New Zealand to take up a Lecturer’s post in 2000, she worked as a Legislative Assistant in the United States House of Representatives on telecommunications and technology issues. Born in Huntsville, Alabama, because her Dad worked on the Moon test rockets in the 1960s, she has a lifelong interest in the public dimensions of technology. She recently published Mendel’s Ark: Biotechnology and the Future of Extinction (2014) and is currently working on a project that analyzes the implications of artificial intelligence and robotics for the future of employment in the United States. She is the Associate Editor of Politics and Life Sciences Journal (Cambridge University Press) and an expert panel member for TechCast Global, based in Washington, D.C.
Amin Toufani
Exonomics
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Amin Toufani founded for-profit and social impact organizations in a range of domains including: artificial intelligence, peer to peer lending, bitcoin, human rights, and international development. In addition to his work at Singularity, he is building the World’s first hedge fund for the poor, as well as Reversopedia – a reverse encyclopedia composed of things we know we don’t know. Amin has a degree in artificial intelligence from the University of British Columbia, an MBA from Stanford, and an MPA in economic policy from Harvard. He attended Harvard and Stanford concurrently and gradated an Arjay Miller Scholar. Google Search ranks him as the world’s best guitar player – a title he readily rejects.
11:30am
Kathryn Myronuk
Future of Work
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Named by CNN as one of The Top 7 Tech Heroes to Watch in 2015, Kathryn Myronuk is a leading expert on exponentially growing technologies and the synthesis of the broad set of related fields of the Singularity movement. Her areas of interest and teaching include the value of synthesis, effective interdisciplinary teams, and the complex set of factors affecting the future of jobs and technological unemployment.
Kathryn has spoken about exponentials, convergence, and the insights of the smart newcomer at AAAS, DLD, WiredUK, the Stockholm Resilience Centre, the Karolinska Institute, California STEM Summit, and Idaho National Labs. She has consulted for Stockholm Resilience Centre, the Orange Institute, and the Institute for the Future among other prominent organizations. Previously she worked as a research analyst and energy economist. She holds degrees in Agricultural Economics and Zoology from UC Davis.
Marc Goodman
Future of Crime and Security
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Marc Goodman is a New York Times Best-Selling author, global strategist and consultant focused on the profound change technology is having on security, business and international affairs. He is the founder of the Future Crimes Institute and has built his expertise in international cyber-crime and terrorism working with organizations including INTERPOL, the UN Counterterrorism Task Force, NATO and the US Government.
Goodman frequently advises industry leaders, security executives and global policy makers on transnational cyber risk and intelligence and has operated in more than 70 countries around the world. Marc’s book, Future Crimes,is a New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today Best-Seller, was selected as Amazon’s Best Business Book of 2015 and has been names on of The Washington Post;s Top Ten Best Books of 2015.
2:30pm
Sue Suckling
Future of Education
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Sue Suckling drives innovation & transformation in both the education sector and commercial sectors, primarily through her positions as Chair of Callaghan Innovation and Chair of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. Alongside these positions, Sue has used her strong understanding of governance to Chair the Capability and Capacity Review for the NZ Health System for the Director General of Health and Chair the governance board for the Minister of Health. In the private sector, Sue has been a Board Director of two top 50 NZX companies and has chaired multiple successful SMEs.
Mark Sagar
Mark Sagar
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Academy Award winner Dr. Mark Sagar is the director of the Laboratory for Animate Technologies at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute, where his interest is in bringing digital characters to life using artificial nervous systems to empower the next generation of human computer interaction. His laboratory is pioneering neurobehavioral animation that combines biologically based models of faces and neural systems to create live, naturally intelligent, and highly expressive interactive systems.
Mark previously worked as the Special Projects Supervisor at Weta Digital and Sony Pictures Imageworks and developed technology for the characters in blockbusters such as Avatar, King Kong, and Spiderman 2. His pioneering work in computer-generated faces was recognized with two consecutive Scientific and Engineering Oscars in 2010 and 2011. Dr. Sagar holds a Ph.D. in Bioengineering and is a recipient of the University of Auckland’s 2012 Distinguished Alumni Award.
Wendy Neale
Wendy Neale
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Wendy Neale is the Director of Fab Lab Wgtn. She focuses on developing resilience, reciprocity and connections between diverse communities on a local and global level. With a digital and craft-based design practice, Wendy designs and creates meaningful objects from waste and obsolete furniture, and also develops furniture with modified traditional joints using digital techniques.
4:45pm
David Roberts
Ethics-Courage-Purpose
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David Roberts is regarded as one of the world’s top experts on disruptive innovation and exponentially advancing technology. He is an award winning CEO and serial entrepreneur, and has started ventures backed with over $100 million of investment from Kleiner Perkins, Vinod Khosla, Cisco, Oracle, Accenture, In-Q-Tel, and others. David is Chairman at HaloDrop, a revolutionary global drone services company, Chairman at 1QBit the world’s first software company for quantum computers, and is a formal adviser to Made-In-Space, responsible for manufacturing the first object in Space with a 3D printer on the Space Station.
David has led the development of some of the most complex, state-of-the art systems ever built, to include satellites, drones, and fusion centers. He also worked as an Investment Banker in the Mergers & Acquisitions Group at Goldman Sachs Headquarters. He received his B.S. in Computer Science & Engineering from M.I.T. was a Distinguished Graduate, and majored in Artificial Intelligence and Bio-Computer Engineering. He holds an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.